There's a big difference between an enjoyable bad movie, and one that's just plain bad. In
Grindhouse, you get one of both, plus some highly entertaining fake exploitation trailers that are likely to get you just as excited as the actual trailers that run before the movie begins. Filmmakers Quentin Tarantino (
Kill Bill) and Robert Rodriguez (
Sin City) have joined cinematic forces to bring us a double feature of early 70s-style exploitation flicks that used to play all the time in drive-in's and run down theaters the nation over. Both have gone to great lengths to capture the look and feel of these films, right down to the scratches and sometimes bad color, making the movie look old and worn, and even a missing reel or two. The movie promises a lot of trashy fun, and for a while, it definitely delivers. But thanks to an extremely slow second half of the double feature and a three hour plus running time,
Grindhouse may wind up being too much of a good thing for some viewers. It certainly was with me.
The first feature film in the line-up is
Planet Terror, an apocalyptic zombie movie directed by Robert Rodriguez. A military bioweapon experiment goes seriously wrong, and winds up turning an entire Texas community into flesh-eating zombies. There are a small band of human survivors who seem to be immune to the gas that is the cause of the problem, and they decide to hole themselves up in a local barbecue place to fight off the onslaught. The two main characters in the film are Cherry (Rose McGowan), a go-go dancer who aspires to be a stand-up comic, and an old flame of hers (Freddy Rodriguez) who is a handy with an automatic weapon, and is even able to equip one on the end of one of Cherry's legs after most of it gets chomped off by one of the zombies. Throw in a cameo by Bruce Willis as the evil military head behind the bioweapon plot and a generous amount of fake blood that looks (intentionally) like raspberry jam, and you have a lot of fun, even if the movie does slow down a bit during the middle portion.
After a couple of fake trailers for films like
Thanksgiving (featuring a homicidal maniac dressed as a pilgrim slicing and dicing horny young teenagers home for the holidays) and a Nazi-themed horror film called
Werewolf Women of the S.S. (With Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu!!), we get Tarantino's feature,
Death Proof. Here's where I expect audiences will start fidgeting, or maybe making that trip to the bathroom. There's nothing exactly wrong with the premise, the film just takes too long to get to where it's going and doesn't even get truly interesting until the final 15 or 20 minutes. It follows a psychotic madman who calls himself Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) who drives around in his invincible car dubbed Death Proof. He targets joy-riding young women, and then stages incredible crashes, which only he is able to survive thanks to his invincible car. We watch how he works as he targets a group of women early on, whom he is successfully able to kill in a head-on collision. (Just to make sure we don't miss a single gory detail, Tarantino plays the crash scene over and over again so we can see a close up of each individual woman in the car meeting her end.) After his most recent successful hunt, he targets another group of women comprised of some women working on a movie being shot nearby. But this time it seems he has picked the wrong girls to mess with, and the hunter becomes the hunted.
While both films have their share of entertainment value,
Planet Terror definitely gets my vote as the superior of the two films. That's mainly because Rodriguez knows how to keep things moving, and stays closer in spirit to the exploitation films of yesteryear. Tarantino's movie sounds great on paper and in concept, but in execution, it is an interminable, talky, wordy slog where we spend too much time listening to two different groups of girls bantering with each other and making references to movies, and not enough time building suspense and giving us what we came to see. Rodriguez's film is a big and enjoyably dumb action horror film that literally gives new meaning to the phrase "no brainer". I also enjoyed the film's music score provided by Rodriguez himself, and seems to be inspired by some of John Carpenter's scores for his films.
Death Proof never seems to actually go anywhere until the film has hit the hour mark. At least when it finally does, Tarantino delivers the good with an impressive car chase battle as both Stuntman Mike and the women (including real life stunt woman Zoe Bell playing herself in her acting debut) battle one another for superiority. The action climax is exciting, with Bell spending most of the chase tied to the hood of the speeding car, and the pace literally becomes unrelenting. Unfortunately, before we get to all this, we have to sit through a lot of dialogue that's not as smart and clever as Tarantino seems to think it is. His film drags the pace down to a near crawl, and by the time the finale comes along to save everything that came before it, I didn't feel as interested as I thought I should have been. The campy spell of
Grindhouse had been broken.
The big problem with both of the films in the feature is that for all their attention to detail in trying to recreate the low budget Z-grade action of the movies it wants to emulate, they still sometimes seem a bit too good. There are some effects in
Planet Terror that you would probably never see in a low budget film, including a couple that looked like they were done with some CG help. If they wanted to truly emulate the style of filmmaking, they should have truly gone bargain basement.
Death Proof at times looks a bit too fancy and too well-shot to be an exploitation film. There's some impressive camera work and a couple shots that I don't think anyone working on the kind of budget the filmmakers were trying to mimic would be able to get. It never quite takes us out of the experience completely, but at the same time, these moments do call attention to themselves. Actually, the short trailers that accompany the main features capture the low budget spirit much better than either of the two films. The trailers were directed by various horror filmmakers including Eli Roth (
Hostel), Rob Zombie (
House of 1,000 Corpses,
The Devil's Rejects) and Edgar Wright (
Shaun of the Dead), and they sometimes seem to have a better understanding of the material. In particular, Eli Roth's
Thanksgiving looks like it could be an actual slasher film from the mid-70s. If viewed alone, it probably could be mistaken for an actual exploitation trailer.
Grindhouse is a mostly enjoyable experience if you're in the right mood, but it's not quite the home run I was expecting given the talent involved. I had a lot of fun at first, but I gradually found myself losing interest slightly, especially when Tarantino's film took over and seemed to be going nowhere fast for far too long. Perhaps the reason why the trailers work better than the main attraction is because both Rodriguez and Tarantino seem to be trying to mimic and sometimes mock the style, whereas the trailers mainly play it straight except for the goofy
Werewolf Women of the S.S. The movie often seems to be trying too hard to be cool by imitating instead of embracing. You can probably tell by reading this review whether or not
Grindhouse is right for you. If the thought of seeing a stripper with a machine gun attached to her leg blowing away numerous zombies makes you laugh, then by all means, have a ball. Anyone but the biggest lovers of classic B-cinema might have a hard time getting into it.
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There's a big difference between an enjoyable bad movie, and one that's just plain bad. In Grindhouse, you get one of both, plus some highly entertaining fake exploitation trailers that are likely to get you just as excited as the actual trailers that run before the movie begins. Filmmakers Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill) and Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) have joined cinematic forces to bring us a double feature of early 70s-style exploitation flicks that used to play all the time in drive-in's and run down theaters the nation over. Both have gone to great lengths to capture the look and feel of these films, right down to the scratches and sometimes bad color, making the movie look old and worn, and even a missing reel or two. The movie promises a lot of trashy fun, and for a while, it definitely delivers. But thanks to an extremely slow second half of the double feature and a three hour plus running time, Grindhouse may wind up being too much of a good thing for some viewers. It certainly was with me.
The first feature film in the line-up is Planet Terror, an apocalyptic zombie movie directed by Robert Rodriguez. A military bioweapon experiment goes seriously wrong, and winds up turning an entire Texas community into flesh-eating zombies. There are a small band of human survivors who seem to be immune to the gas that is the cause of the problem, and they decide to hole themselves up in a local barbecue place to fight off the onslaught. The two main characters in the film are Cherry (Rose McGowan), a go-go dancer who aspires to be a stand-up comic, and an old flame of hers (Freddy Rodriguez) who is a handy with an automatic weapon, and is even able to equip one on the end of one of Cherry's legs after most of it gets chomped off by one of the zombies. Throw in a cameo by Bruce Willis as the evil military head behind the bioweapon plot and a generous amount of fake blood that looks (intentionally) like raspberry jam, and you have a lot of fun, even if the movie does slow down a bit during the middle portion.
After a couple of fake trailers for films like Thanksgiving (featuring a homicidal maniac dressed as a pilgrim slicing and dicing horny young teenagers home for the holidays) and a Nazi-themed horror film called Werewolf Women of the S.S. (With Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu!!), we get Tarantino's feature, Death Proof. Here's where I expect audiences will start fidgeting, or maybe making that trip to the bathroom. There's nothing exactly wrong with the premise, the film just takes too long to get to where it's going and doesn't even get truly interesting until the final 15 or 20 minutes. It follows a psychotic madman who calls himself Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) who drives around in his invincible car dubbed Death Proof. He targets joy-riding young women, and then stages incredible crashes, which only he is able to survive thanks to his invincible car. We watch how he works as he targets a group of women early on, whom he is successfully able to kill in a head-on collision. (Just to make sure we don't miss a single gory detail, Tarantino plays the crash scene over and over again so we can see a close up of each individual woman in the car meeting her end.) After his most recent successful hunt, he targets another group of women comprised of some women working on a movie being shot nearby. But this time it seems he has picked the wrong girls to mess with, and the hunter becomes the hunted.
While both films have their share of entertainment value, Planet Terror definitely gets my vote as the superior of the two films. That's mainly because Rodriguez knows how to keep things moving, and stays closer in spirit to the exploitation films of yesteryear. Tarantino's movie sounds great on paper and in concept, but in execution, it is an interminable, talky, wordy slog where we spend too much time listening to two different groups of girls bantering with each other and making references to movies, and not enough time building suspense and giving us what we came to see. Rodriguez's film is a big and enjoyably dumb action horror film that literally gives new meaning to the phrase "no brainer". I also enjoyed the film's music score provided by Rodriguez himself, and seems to be inspired by some of John Carpenter's scores for his films. Death Proof never seems to actually go anywhere until the film has hit the hour mark. At least when it finally does, Tarantino delivers the good with an impressive car chase battle as both Stuntman Mike and the women (including real life stunt woman Zoe Bell playing herself in her acting debut) battle one another for superiority. The action climax is exciting, with Bell spending most of the chase tied to the hood of the speeding car, and the pace literally becomes unrelenting. Unfortunately, before we get to all this, we have to sit through a lot of dialogue that's not as smart and clever as Tarantino seems to think it is. His film drags the pace down to a near crawl, and by the time the finale comes along to save everything that came before it, I didn't feel as interested as I thought I should have been. The campy spell of Grindhouse had been broken.
The big problem with both of the films in the feature is that for all their attention to detail in trying to recreate the low budget Z-grade action of the movies it wants to emulate, they still sometimes seem a bit too good. There are some effects in Planet Terror that you would probably never see in a low budget film, including a couple that looked like they were done with some CG help. If they wanted to truly emulate the style of filmmaking, they should have truly gone bargain basement. Death Proof at times looks a bit too fancy and too well-shot to be an exploitation film. There's some impressive camera work and a couple shots that I don't think anyone working on the kind of budget the filmmakers were trying to mimic would be able to get. It never quite takes us out of the experience completely, but at the same time, these moments do call attention to themselves. Actually, the short trailers that accompany the main features capture the low budget spirit much better than either of the two films. The trailers were directed by various horror filmmakers including Eli Roth (Hostel), Rob Zombie (House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects) and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), and they sometimes seem to have a better understanding of the material. In particular, Eli Roth's Thanksgiving looks like it could be an actual slasher film from the mid-70s. If viewed alone, it probably could be mistaken for an actual exploitation trailer.
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